Corbyn’s useful idiots

The news that Jeremy Corbyn met a Czechoslovakian agent three times during the 1980s, when the Cold War was still very much in progress, has come as a shock to some. But it should not come as a surprise. What we have discovered so far fits entirely with everything we know about Corbyn’s character and his sympathies. He does not appear to have sold secrets, or even to be interested in anything venal. To judge by Czech sources, he was unaware that the man he was meeting was an agent attempting to recruit him. This was at a time when British diplomats were trained to work on the assumption that everyone they met from behind the Iron Curtain was a spy: Corbyn seems to have been blithely unaware of what he was walking into.

But that is the Labour leader all over. He had, and still has, a naive belief in the good of socialism that blinds him to the reality of dictatorships, and to the many millions who have been murdered in its name.